Rebuilding the web

One of the (many) ways people can be shortsighted is in their seeming determination to view non-human species as inconsequential except insofar as they have a direct benefit to humans.

The truth, of course, is a great deal more nuanced than that.  One well-studied example is the reintroduction of gray wolves to Yellowstone National Park, something that was opposed by ranchers who owned land adjacent to the park, hunters who were concerned that wolves would reduce numbers of deer, elk, and moose for hunting, and people worried that wolves might attack humans visiting the park or the area surrounding it.  The latter, especially, is ridiculous; between 2002 and 2020 there were 489 verified wolf/human attacks worldwide, of which a little over three-quarters occurred because the animal was rabid.  Only eight were fatal.  The study, carried out by scientists at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, stated outright that the risks associated with a wolf attacking a human were "non-zero, but far too low to calculate."

Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed, and the wolf reintroduction went forward as scheduled, starting in 1996.  The results were nothing short of spectacular.  Elk populations had skyrocketed following the destruction of the pre-existing wolf population in the early twentieth century, resulting in such high overgrazing that willows and aspens were virtually eradicated from the park.  This caused the beaver population to plummet, as well as several species of songbirds that depend on the insects hosted by those trees.  The drop in the number of beaver colonies meant less damming of streams, resulting in small creeks drying up completely in summer and a resultant crash of fish populations.

In the years since wolves were reintroduced, all of that has reversed.  Elk populations have returned to stable numbers (and far fewer die of starvation in the winter).  Aspen and willow groves have come back, along with the beavers and songbirds that depend on them.  The ponds and wetlands are rebuilding, and the fish that declined so precipitously have begun to rebound.

All of which illustrates the truth of the famous quote by naturalist John Muir: "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."

The reason this all comes up is a recent story in Science News about a project that should give you hope; the restoration of mangrove forests in Kenya.  You probably know that mangroves are a group of trees that form impenetrable thickets along coastlines.  They've been eradicated in a lot of places -- particularly stretches of coast with sandy shores potentially attractive to tourists -- resulting in increased erosion and drastically increased damage potential from hurricanes.  A 2020 study found that having an intact mangrove buffer zone along a coast decreased the damage to human settlements and agricultural land from a direct hurricane strike by an average of 24%.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NOAA]

The Kenyan project, however, was driven by two other benefits of mangrove preservation and reintroduction -- carbon sequestration and increased fish yields.  Mangrove swamps have been shown to be four times better at carbon capture and storage as inland forests, and their tangled submerged root systems are havens for hatchling fish and the plankton they eat.  The restoration has been successful enough that similar projects have been launched in Mozambique and Madagascar.  A UN-funded project called Mikoko Pamoja allows communities that are involved in mangrove restoration to receive money for "carbon credits" that then can be reinvested into the community infrastructure -- with the result that the towns of Gazi and Makongeni, nearest to the mangrove swamps and responsible for their protection, have become economically self-sufficient.

I have the feeling that small, locally-run projects like Mikoko Pamoja will be how we'll save our global ecosystem -- and, most importantly, realizing that species having no immediately obvious direct benefit to humans (like wolves and mangroves) are nevertheless critical for maintaining the health of the complex, interlocked web of life we all depend on.  It means taking our blinders off, and understanding that our everyday actions do have an impact.  I'll end with a quote from one of my heroes, the late Kenyan activist Wangari Maathai: "In order to accomplish anything," she said, "we must keep our feelings of empowerment ahead of our feelings of despair.  We cannot do everything, but still there are many things we can do."

****************************************

What doesn't kill you

In evolutionary biology, it's always a little risky to attribute a feature to a specific selective pressure.

Why, for example, do humans have upright posture, unique amongst primates?  Three suggestions are:

• a more upright posture allowed for longer sight distance, both for seeing predators and potential prey
• standing upright freed our hands to manipulate tools
• our ancestors mostly lived by the shores of lakes, and an ability to wade while walking upright gave us access to the food-rich shallows along the edge

So which is it?  Possibly all three, and other reasons as well.  Evolution rarely is pushed in a particular pressure by just one factor.  What's interesting in this case is that upright posture is a classic example of an evolutionary trade-off; whatever advantage it gave us, it also destabilized our lumbar spines, giving humans the most lower back problems of any mammal (with the possible exceptions of dachshunds and basset hounds, who hardly got their low-slung stature through natural selection).

Sometimes, though, there's a confluence of seeming cause and effect that is so suggestive it's hard to pass up as an explanation.  Consider, for example, the rationale outlined in the paper that appeared this week in Science Advances, called "Increased Ecological Resource Variability During a Critical Transition in Hominin Evolution," by a team led by Richard Potts, director of the Human Origins Program of the Smithsonian Institution.

What the paper looks at is an oddly abrupt leap in the technology used by our distant ancestors that occurred about four hundred thousand years ago.  Using artifacts collected at the famous archaeological site Olorgesailie (in Kenya), the researchers saw that after a stable period lasting seven hundred thousand years, during which the main weapons tech -- stone hand axes -- barely changed at all, our African forebears suddenly jumped ahead to smaller, more sophisticated weapons and tools.  Additionally, they began to engage in trade with groups in other areas, and the evidence is that this travel, interaction, and trade enriched the culture of hominin groups all over East Africa.  (If you have twenty minutes, check out the wonderful TED Talk by Matt Ridley called "When Ideas Have Sex" -- it's about the cross-fertilizing effects of trade on cultures, and is absolutely brilliant.)

Olorgesailie, Kenya, where our distant ancestors lived [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rossignol Benoît, OlorgesailieLandscape1993, CC BY-SA 3.0]

So what caused this prehistoric Great Leap Forward?  The Potts et al. team found that it coincides exactly with a period of natural destabilization in the area -- a change in climate that caused what was a wet, fertile, humid subtropical forest to change into savanna, a rapid overturning of the mammalian megafauna in the region (undoubtedly because of the climate change), and a sudden increase in tectonic activity along the East African Rift Zone, a divergent fault underneath the eastern part of Africa that ultimately is going to rip the continent in two.

The result was a drastic decrease in resources such as food and fresh water, and a landscape where survival was a great deal more uncertain than it had been.  The researchers suggest -- and the evidence seems strong -- that the ecological shifts led directly to our ancestors' innovations and behavioral changes.  Put simply, to survive, we had to get more clever about it.

The authors write:

Although climate change is considered to have been a large-scale driver of African human evolution, landscape-scale shifts in ecological resources that may have shaped novel hominin adaptations are rarely investigated.  We use well-dated, high-resolution, drill-core datasets to understand ecological dynamics associated with a major adaptive transition in the archeological record ~24 km from the coring site.  Outcrops preserve evidence of the replacement of Acheulean by Middle Stone Age (MSA) technological, cognitive, and social innovations between 500 and 300 thousand years (ka) ago, contemporaneous with large-scale taxonomic and adaptive turnover in mammal herbivores.  Beginning ~400 ka ago, tectonic, hydrological, and ecological changes combined to disrupt a relatively stable resource base, prompting fluctuations of increasing magnitude in freshwater availability, grassland communities, and woody plant cover.  Interaction of these factors offers a resource-oriented hypothesis for the evolutionary success of MSA adaptations, which likely contributed to the ecological flexibility typical of Homo sapiens foragers.

So what didn't kill us did indeed make us stronger.  Or at least smarter.

Like I said, it's always thin ice to attribute an adaptation to a specific cause, but here, the climatic and tectonic shifts occurring at almost exactly the same time as the cultural ones seems far much to attribute to coincidence. 

And of course, what it makes me wonder is how the drastic climatic shifts we're forcing today by our own reckless behavior are going to reshape our species.  Because we're not somehow immune to evolutionary pressure; yes, we've eliminated a lot of the diseases and malnutrition that acted as selectors on our population in pre-technological times, but if we mess up the climate enough, we'll very quickly find ourselves staring down the barrel of natural selection once again.

Which won't be pleasant.  I'm pretty certain that whatever happens, we're not going extinct any time soon, but the ecological catastrophe we're increasingly seeming to be facing won't leave us unscathed.  I wonder what innovations and adaptations we'll end up with to help us cope?

My guess is whatever they are, they'll be even more drastic than the ones that occurred to our kin four hundred thousand years ago.

**********************************

Have any scientifically-minded friends who like to cook?  Or maybe, you've wondered why some recipes are so flexible, and others have to be followed to the letter?

Do I have the book for you.

In Science and Cooking: Physics Meets Food, from Homemade to Haute Cuisine, by Michael Brenner, Pia Sörensen, and David Weitz, you find out why recipes work the way they do -- and not only how altering them (such as using oil versus margarine versus butter in cookies) will affect the outcome, but what's going on that makes it happen that way.

Along the way, you get to read interviews with today's top chefs, and to find out some of their favorite recipes for you to try out in your own kitchen.  Full-color (and mouth-watering) illustrations are an added filigree, but the text by itself makes this book a must-have for anyone who enjoys cooking -- and wants to learn more about why it works the way it does.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The tree planter

Yesterday I was thinking about issues of empowerment versus despair.

I guess it's understandable enough, given our current state of affairs, with an ongoing pandemic, and countries all over the world being swallowed up by a me-first populism that values short-term expediency over everything else, including the quality of human lives.  Hard to stay positive in a situation like this.

A lot of times, the issue is framed in a religious context.  Being an atheist, how can I not let my perception that the world is without a divinely-guided plan and final purpose drive me downward emotionally?  And linked to this is the similar question of how, as someone who is very aware of human failings (both in the intellectual and social realms), I don't give up on our species entirely.

I think it has to do with my attitude that even if all I make are small steps, it is still better to make those steps than to give up and stand still.  It is my motivation for writing this blog.  Perhaps a lot of what I do here at Skeptophilia is preaching to the choir; I suspect that most of my readership comes from people who, like myself, are questioners and skeptics and rationalists.  But if by what I write I can prod even one person to take a closer look at his or her basic assumptions about how the universe works, then what I am doing is worth it.

The same impetus kept me teaching for thirty-two years.  I knew all too well that most of my students wouldn't become scientists, but I was (and am) absolutely fine with that.  I also knew I wouldn't be able to reach them all, a truth which is discouraging and perhaps inevitable.  But if I opened up the eyes of some of the people in my classes -- showed them a bit of the world they hadn't ever thought about, made them go, "Wow, this universe is a strange and cool and wondrous place!" -- then in my view, I succeeded.

Which brings me to Wangari Maathai.

In this disillusioned and jaded world, Maathai was a true hero.  She was born in Kenya in 1940, and grew up in traditional Kikuyu culture -- strict gender roles, and an attitude toward the land that it was meant to be used, not protected.  Her shattering of the terribly low glass ceiling for women in east Africa started early, though.  She graduated with a Ph.D. in veterinary medicine 1971, becoming the first east African woman to earn a doctorate, and shortly afterwards was hired to teach veterinary science at the University of Nairobi.

Wangari Maathai [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Kingkongphoto & www.celebrity-photos.com from Laurel Maryland, USA, Wangari Maathai in 2001, CC BY-SA 2.0]

But Maathai was not content with being a college lecturer, as groundbreaking as that was for a woman of her culture.  She looked around her at the environmental devastation in her beloved country, and the lack of empowerment many women felt, and decided that there was no reason she had to accept either of those things.

So she changed the world.

She started the Green Belt Movement, a campaign for tree replanting.  "When resources are degraded, we start competing for them," Maathai wrote, "whether it is at the local level in Kenya, where we had tribal clashes over land and water, or at the global level, where we are fighting over water, oil, and minerals.  So one way to promote peace is to promote sustainable management and equitable distribution of resources."

She fought for the rights of women, successfully instituting a small business loan program in rural Kenya with the hopes of making villages self-sufficient, and making women no longer dependent on men for income.  She fostered tree replanting and environmental protection programs all over east Africa, while simultaneously encouraging sustainable farming practices that did not rely on cutting down forests and exhausting farmland.

And it worked, but it was not without cost.  Her husband divorced her in 1977, claiming that she was "too strong-minded for a woman" and that he was "unable to control her."  The government, then a one-party dictatorship, tried to silence her, first with a disinformation program (they called her women's rights group "a bunch of divorcees controlled by a crazy woman").  She was attacked and beaten by policemen, arrested more than once, and was on a list of people targeted by President Daniel arap Moi for assassination.

It didn't stop her.  "In order to accomplish anything," Maathai said, "we must keep our feelings of empowerment ahead of our feelings of despair.  We cannot do everything, but still there are many things we can do."

Many things.  Yes, she did indeed.  She was instrumental in Kenya's return to a multi-party democracy.  She singlehandedly drove the regreening of Kenya's rural areas.  In 2002, she was elected to Kenya's parliament.

In 2004, she won the Nobel Peace Prize.

All this from a woman who would not accept the role she'd been cast in, would not simply sit back and weep over the way things are.  Maathai never gave up on her vision, and because of that, she overturned generations of repression and sexism and environmental degradation.

No, she didn't eradicate those things entirely.  Kenya, and the rest of the world, still has a long way to go.  Yet Maathai never let the pitfalls and backslides get in the way of her belief that humans are fundamentally good, and the world is worth saving.  When she died in 2011 at the age of 71, she had accomplished more than most of us would in ten lifetimes -- all through being steadfast and brave and, most importantly, not accepting that the status quo was inevitable.

She remained, to the end, modest about what she'd done.  Any of us, Maathai said, could do the same; all it takes is a vision and sufficient courage.  "I don't really know why I care so much," Maathai said.  "I just have something inside me that tells me that there is a problem, and I have got to do something about it...  It's the little things citizens do.  That's what will make the difference."

She smiled, and added, "My little thing is planting trees."

**********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is for people who are fascinated with the latest research on our universe, but are a little daunted by the technical aspects: Space at the Speed of Light: The History of 14 Billion Years for People Short on Time by Oxford University astrophysicist Becky Smethurst.

A whirlwind tour of the most recent discoveries from the depths of space -- and I do mean recent, because it was only released a couple of weeks ago -- Smethurst's book is a delightful voyage into the workings of some of the strangest objects we know of -- quasars, black holes, neutron stars, pulsars, blazars, gamma-ray bursters, and many others.  Presented in a way that's scientifically accurate but still accessible to the layperson, it will give you an understanding of what we know about the events of the last 13.8 billion years, and the ultimate fate of the universe in the next few billions.  If you have a fascination for what's up there in the night sky, this book is for you!

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Tetanus, hCG, and the danger of rumors

There's harmless woo-woo, and then there's woo-woo where people die.

It's all too easy to write off a lot of weird, counterfactual beliefs as harmless.  Certainly, some of them are; astrology, for example, is dangerous only to your pocketbook, at least overtly.  I've made the point, though, that engaging in such nonsense dulls you to the necessity that claims be established on the basis of evidence and some kind of scientific rigor.

But the potentially deadly variants of this particular sort of worldview do exist.  And we've just seen an example, in the claim that Kenya's tetanus vaccination program is part of a secret mass-sterilization effort designed to reduce the human population in east Africa.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Let's start out with some facts.  Tetanus is caused by a bacteria, and vaccination has a near 100% success rate of preventing the illness.  Unvaccinated, 50% or more victims die, and that's even if they seek medical treatment after symptoms start.  61,000 people died last year from it, which (to put it in perspective) is a little under ten times the number of documented deaths from Ebola ever.

So it's a serious health issue, and the last thing we need is someone putting the vaccination program on the skids.  Which is exactly what the Catholic Church in Kenya has done, by claiming that the vaccine is laced with hCG (human chorionic gonadotropin), which in sufficient quantities can cause lower fertility and/or miscarriages.

The fact is, the vaccines were not laced with hCG, and scientists even know how the claim started.  Back in the 1990s, there were allegations launched by the Catholic Church that there was something suspicious about the vaccination program, and some Kenyan labs tested the vaccine using an ordinary pregnancy test kit to see if it showed a positive result (and thus could contain the hormone).  They claim that there were some positive results, but the procedure was faulty, as was described in detail over at the science blog Respectful Insolence:

After these rumours were spread, attempts were made to analyse TT vaccines for the presence of hCG.  The vaccines were sent to hospital laboratories and tested using pregnancy test kits which are developed for use on serum and urine specimens and are not appropriate for use on a vaccine such as TT, which contains a special preservative (merthiolate) and an adjuvant (aluminum salt).  As a result of using these inappropriate tests, low levels of hCG-like activity were found in some samples of TT vaccine.  The laboratories themselves recognised the significance of these results, which were below the reliable detection capabilities of the adjuvant or other substances in the the vaccine and the test kit.  However, these results were misrepresented by ‘pro-life groups with the resulting disruption of immunisation programmes. 

When the vaccines were tested in laboratories which used properly validated test systems, the results showed that the vaccines clearly did not contain hCG.

In other words: the vaccines were safe, and not some part of a secret conspiracy to sterilize women in Kenya.  And, in fact, even if it were true, it's not working; the current birth rate in Kenya is 28.27 live births per 1,000 population -- or roughly twice the birth rate in the United States.

Oh, wait, we've all been vaccinated, too.  Q.e.d., I guess.

But the allegations became strident enough that responsible medical researchers launched their own investigation, and found (surprise!) no problems:

(T)he findings of the laboratory tests... all come out with normal values from the reference values assuming that the woman is not pregnant.  The highest level of the β-HCG hormone was found to be 1.12 mIU/ml (and 1.2 mIU/ml for S-Quantitative β-HCG).  There was no control used (or presented) and it would have been interesting to see what the result will be with tap water.  There is a situation where ant- β-HCG antibodies can be produced by the body and that can act as a contraceptive, however, this requires the administration of at-least 100 to 500 micrograms of HCG bound to tetanus vaccine (about 11,904,000 to 59,520,000 mIU/ml of the same hormone where currently less than 1 mIU-ml has been reported from the lab results.

The fact that there's absolutely no truth to this rumor has not stopped the Catholic Church from persisting with the allegations, nor people circulating this story around as if it has the slightest basis in reality.  Just last week, two Kenyan bishops and a prominent Catholic doctor made public their claim that the WHO vaccination program was, in reality, a forced sterilization program.  Dr. Muhame Ngare, of Mercy Medical Centre in Nairobi, said in a press release:

We sent six samples from around Kenya to laboratories in South Africa.  They tested positive for the HCG antigen.  They were all laced with HCG...  This proved right our worst fears; that this WHO campaign is not about eradicating neonatal tetanus but a well-coordinated forceful population control mass sterilization exercise using a proven fertility regulating vaccine.  This evidence was presented to the Ministry of Health before the third round of immunization but was ignored.

The problem is, they used the same test as the one performed back in the 1990s, which already has been shown to give false positives.  Which once again proves that if you don't know how to do science correctly, you shouldn't be making scientific press releases.

So this hasn't stopped the rumor mill, nor the anti-vaxx outrage here in the United States.  I've already seen the story (without, of course, the round debunking over at Respectful Insolence) at least six times on social media, usually with some sort of commentary like, "Isn't this horrible?" or "Think twice before you let them stick needles in your children!"

The whole thing is maddening, especially given the fact that this vaccine could prevent the deaths, in horrible agony, of 60,000 people this year.  If, of course, the anti-scientific rumor mill would get the fuck out of the way.  And if the Catholic Church would, for once, support science rather than impeding it.

The tree planter

Yesterday I was thinking about issues of empowerment versus despair.

I get asked questions along this line frequently.  Being an atheist, how can I not let my perception that the world is without final purpose drive me downward emotionally?  And linked to this is the similar question of how, as someone who is very aware of human failings (both in the intellectual and social realms), I don't give up on our species entirely.

I think it has to do with my attitude that even if all I make are small steps, it is still better to make those steps than to give up and stand still.  It is my motivation for writing this blog.  Perhaps a lot of what I do here at Skeptophilia is preaching to the choir; I suspect that most of my readership comes from people who, like myself, are questioners and skeptics and rationalists.  But if by what I write I can prod even one person to take a closer look at his or her basic assumptions about how the universe works, then what I am doing is worth it.

The same impetus keeps me teaching.  I know that most of my students won't become scientists, and I am absolutely fine with that.  I also know I won't be able to reach them all, a truth which is discouraging but perhaps inevitable.  But if I can open up the eyes of some of the people in my classes -- show them a bit of the world they hadn't ever thought about, make them go, "Wow, this universe is a strange and cool and wondrous place!" -- then I will have succeeded.

Which brings me to Wangari Maathai.

In this disillusioned and jaded world, Maathai was a true hero.  She was born in Kenya in 1940, and grew up in traditional Kikuyu culture -- strict gender roles, and an attitude toward the land that it was meant to be used, not protected.  Her shattering of the terribly low glass ceiling for women in east Africa started early, though.  She graduated with a Ph.D. in veterinary medicine 1971, becoming the first east African woman to earn a doctorate, and shortly afterwards was hired to teach veterinary science at the University of Nairobi.

Wangari Maathai [image courtesy of photographer Martin Rowe and the Wikimedia Commons]

But Maathai was not content with being a college lecturer, as groundbreaking as that was for a woman of her culture.  She looked around her at the environmental devastation in her beloved country, and the lack of empowerment many women felt, and decided that there was no reason she had to accept either of those things.

So she changed the world.

She started the Green Belt Movement, a campaign for tree replanting.  "When resources are degraded, we start competing for them," Maathai wrote, "whether it is at the local level in Kenya, where we had tribal clashes over land and water, or at the global level, where we are fighting over water, oil, and minerals.  So one way to promote peace is to promote sustainable management and equitable distribution of resources."

She fought for the rights of women, successfully instituting a small business loan program in rural Kenya with the hopes of making villages self-sufficient, and making women no longer dependent on men for income.  She fostered tree replanting and environmental protection programs all over east Africa, while simultaneously encouraging sustainable farming practices that did not rely on cutting down forests and exhausting farmland.

And it worked, but it was not without cost.  Her husband divorced her in 1977, claiming that she was "too strong-minded for a woman" and that he was "unable to control her."  The government, then a one-party dictatorship, tried to silence her, first with a disinformation program (they called her women's rights group "a bunch of divorcees controlled by a crazy woman").  She was attacked and beaten by policemen, arrested more than once, and was on a list of people targeted by President Daniel arap Moi for assassination.

It didn't stop her.  "In order to accomplish anything," Maathai said, "we must keep our feelings of empowerment ahead of our feelings of despair.  We cannot do everything, but still there are many things we can do."

Many things.  Yes, she did indeed.  She was instrumental in Kenya's return to a multi-party democracy.  She singlehandedly drove the regreening of Kenya's rural areas.  In 2002, she was elected to Kenya's parliament.

In 2004, she won the Nobel Peace Prize.

All this from a woman who would not accept the role she'd been cast in, would not simply sit back and weep over the way things are.  Maathai never gave up on her vision, and because of that, she overturned generations of repression and sexism and environmental degradation.

No, she didn't eradicate those things entirely.  Kenya, and the rest of the world, still has a long way to go.  Yet Maathai never let the pitfalls and backslides get in the way of her belief that humans are fundamentally good, and the world is worth saving.  When she died in 2011 at the age of 71, she had accomplished more than most of us would in ten lifetimes -- all through being steadfast and brave and, most importantly, not accepting that the status quo was inevitable.

She remained, to the end, modest about what she'd done.  Any of us, Maathai said, could do the same; all it takes is a vision and sufficient courage.  "I don't really know why I care so much," Maathai said.  "I just have something inside me that tells me that there is a problem, and I have got to do something about it...  It's the little things citizens do.  That's what will make the difference."

She smiled, and added, "My little thing is planting trees."

Retrying the Lord

New from the Well, If It Makes You Happy department, we have a story about a lawyer in Kenya who is trying to have Jesus' conviction overturned.  [Source]

Dola Indidis, a former spokesperson for the Kenyan judiciary, is petitioning the International Court of Justice at The Hague to give Jesus a posthumous pardon.  "The selective and malicious prosecution (of Jesus) violated his human rights," Indidis said, adding that Pontius Pilate was guilty of "judicial misconduct, abuse of office, bias and prejudice."

This isn't the first time Indidis has attempted this.  In 2007, he brought his case to the Kenyan High Court, but they threw it out, claiming that they "lacked jurisdiction."

Now, I'm no expert in international law, but it does strike me as a bit of a legal quagmire, given that (1) all of the people involved in the trial have been dead for almost 2,000 years, (2) the only documents referring to the case are in the New Testament, which even true believers can't claim to be an unbiased source, and (3) the governmental body by which Jesus was tried doesn't, technically, exist any more.  The Roman Empire itself more or less ceased to be 1,500 odd years ago, so it's not like there'll be any possible response from them.

My gut reaction has always been that posthumous pardons are a little... pointless.  It's not that they're uncommon; the convictions of the Salem "witches" were overturned one by one, the last ones in 1992 (and honestly, it surprises me that it took that long).  Joan of Arc was retried in 1456, only 25 years after her execution, and found innocent of heresy -- the first step that would lead to her eventual canonization in 1920.  Even poor Alan Turing, convicted of homosexual acts in the United Kingdom in 1952 and "chemically castrated" with female hormones (a treatment that many believe contributed to his severe depression and ultimate suicide in 1954), stands a good chance of receiving an official pardon this year.  And while I certainly think that the motivation for these pardons is good, and I can understand the desire of family members to clear their relatives' unfairly besmirched names, it doesn't do the victims much good in the here-and-now.

Might make better sense to work on improving the justice system we currently have, to make sure such injustices don't continue to happen, don't you think?

Be that as it may, Dola Indidis' quixotic quest to secure a retrial for The Son of God opens up the far thornier problem of whether the religious folks in the world want Jesus to be pardoned.  As far as I understand it, the whole point of the New Testament is that Jesus died for our sins, and God The Father sent him down here specifically so he would die.  Right?  So wouldn't pardoning him kind of be... counterproductive, salvation-of-humanity-wise?

Now, I have to admit that I have never understood this whole point, and even though I'm an atheist I've read a good bit of what various Christian apologists have to say about it.  It seems to boil down to god sending himself to be tortured and executed for crimes he didn't commit in order for him to forgive us for sins we did commit, which makes no sense whatsoever.  After all, if god wanted to forgive us, why didn't he just go ahead and do it without all of the unpleasant flogging and crown of thorns and crucifixion business?  I don't really see what was gained by the whole episode other than generating hundreds of thousands of pieces of really grotesque statuary, suitable for scaring Christian children lo unto this very day.

Indidis, himself a Roman Catholic, doesn't seem to see any problem with this, but the whole thing has clearly shaken up the powers-that-be in Kenya.  Father Maloba Wesonga, spokesperson for the diocese of Nairobi, seemed to be uncertain how to respond, when he heard about Indidis' idea.  "As we know it, the trial had to happen," Wesonga said to reporters.  "We must understand that Jesus was not vulnerable and nobody can do justice to God."

Which puts him in the odd position, as a Catholic priest, of saying he is in favor of sustaining Jesus' conviction and execution.

You have to wonder how the Catholics are going to reconcile that stance.

I'm guessing that the International Court of Justice will probably refuse to hear Indidis' case, given that they have plenty of better things to do with their time.  So this whole issue will probably fizzle, which honestly is kind of a shame.  I'd love to see how they'd decide the case, because any way it came out, it'd be hard to predict how the Christians would spin it.  As far as Indidis goes, he really should find a new hobby, like putting his mind to seeing that justice is done for people who are still alive.  He could start with his own country, which hasn't exactly had a sterling track record, especially in its turning a blind eye to child prostitution.  Seems to me that this would be a better use of time, energy, and money than trying to determine whether a guy who lived and died almost two millennia ago should receive an official pardon.

Dead sheep, live elves, and a stuck willy

Here at Worldwide Wacko Watch, we've got our eyes on three stories from far afield.

Let's begin with a tragedy in Wales, and hope things get cheerier as we progress.

In our first story, we have reports that the Beast of Bont is at it again, so you might want to cancel that walking tour in the Cambrian Mountains.  (Source)

Sheep farmers in Pontrhydfendigaid, a small town near Aberystwyth, discovered last week that twenty sheep had been "massacred" in a spot near Devil's Bridge.  This immediately conjured up memories of past attacks, which reportedly have been going on since the 1970s, and have been attributed to a loathsome predator nicknamed "the Beast of Bont."

In this most recent attack, local resident Mark Davey and his partner Annette made the discovery.  "The whole area just stank of dead animals and was quite sickening," Davey told reporters.  "I could see that the inside of the animals had been ripped out and body parts were lying all around.  I thought it could have been foxes or badgers but it was just the increasing number of dead sheep that started the alarm bells ringing in my head.  As we walked further we saw several more sheep scattered closely together, again as though some large animal had attacked them.  We were getting quite scared and wondered what the hell was doing this."

Myself, I would have wondered to the extent that I'd have gotten right the hell out of there.

"Each time we saw them we thought that something had quite clearly attacked them because they looked like they had been ripped apart," Davey said.  "It was a very strange feeling when we saw the sheep because some of them were lambs with just half of their bodies, or just the rear or the back legs left on the field.  I could also see a small lamb which looked to me as if it had been carefully placed in the corner of some building ruins.  This one was untouched but it appeared that it had been put there for a reason - maybe to come back to it later."

Police say that the pattern of sheep-killings resembles others that have occurred in the area.

Despite periodic reports of "large, puma-like creatures" in the Cambrian Mountains, no one has been able to obtain any kind of reasonably reliable evidence to indicate what might be responsible for the killings.  Thus far, only sheep and goats have been attacked, but police have instructed locals to "be vigilant when outdoors."  That's putting it mildly.  If this had happened in my neighborhood, I might become vigilant to the point of never leaving my house again.  I'm just brave that way.


Of course, if you don't want to meet weird things away from home, you can always have the weird things brought to your doorstep.  This is the philosophy of Arní Johnson, an Icelandic Member of Parliament who decided to bring a boulder housing "three generations of elves" to his front yard.  (Source)

Johnson first ran into the boulder in a nearly literal sense, when he was involved in a serious car accident in January of 2010.  His car flipped, landing forty meters away from the highway, damaging it beyond repair -- but leaving Johnson completely unharmed.  Johnson decided that it couldn't just have been luck, so he started looking around for what could have saved him, and then he saw this great big rock.

Now, I've been to Iceland, and I can say with some authority that great big rocks are a dime a dozen.  Iceland itself seems, in fact, to be one great big rock, with a little bit of ice and grass to break up the monotony.  But this was no ordinary rock, Johnson said; no, it was the home of some elves, and the elves had saved his life.

"I had Ragnhildur Jónsdóttir, a specialist in the affairs of elves from Álfagarðurinn in Hellisgerði, Hafnarfjörður, to come look at the boulder with me," Johnson said.  "She said it was incredible, that she had never met three generations of elves in the same boulder before.  She said an elderly couple lives on the upper floor but a young couple with three children on the lower floor."

My first question is: how do you become an elf specialist?  Do Icelandic universities allow you to major in elfology?  If so, how do you study them, being that even people who think they exist say that they don't exactly wait around for you to examine them closely?  Be that as it may, Johnson was tickled with what Jónsdóttir told him, and decided to have the boulder moved to his home in Höfðaból in the Westman Islands.  Jónsdóttir said that the elves were fine being moved, but that he had to do it right.  "(The elves) asked whether the boulder could stand on grass.  I said that was no problem but asked why they wanted grass.  ‘It’s because they want to have sheep,’ Ragnhildur replied."  So Johnson is having the boulder ferried across to his home, wrapped in sheepskin "so the elves are comfortable."

After the horrors caused by the Beast of Bont, you have to wonder exactly why the elves want to have sheep nearby.  But we're hoping that the elves have no ill intent, and the whole story will end happily.


And a happy ending is more than we can say happened for an adulterous couple in Kenya, who discovered during an amorous encounter that a curse by the woman's husband had left them stuck together.  (Source)

According to the story, the husband had gotten wind of his wife's cheating ways, and had hired a practitioner of black magic to cast a spell on the wife.  The next time the wife and her paramour went at it, the unfortunate man found that he had basically been making love to one of those Chinese finger-traps.

Once the couple realized that their hook-up had left them unable to unhook, they panicked, and their shouts of alarm attracted the attention of the police and an increasingly large crowd.  Finally the husband arrived, and after the adulterous man agreed to pay the husband twenty thousand shillings in reparations, a pastor was called in, who prayed over the couple, and the two were able to separate.  It is probably just my sordid imagination that pictures this as being accompanied by a sound like a cork being pulled from a wine bottle.

I do have to ask, however; do Kenyan pastors have special prayers for this kind of thing?  "O Lord, we beseech thee to call forth thy mighty powers, and help this sinner free his wang, that he might go forth and never more boink another guy's wife, for yea, I believeth that he hath learned his lesson."


So, those are our stories for today -- the sheep-eating Beast of Bont, transporting elf boulders, and adulterous men getting their willies stuck.  Here at Worldwide Wacko Watch, we are constantly alert, bringing you only the finest quality journalism from the world of the weird.  "Ever vigilant," that's our motto.  That, and "Man, people believe some weird stuff, you have to wonder if we skeptics are justified in having any hope at all."  But that's kind of depressing, so we'll stick with "Ever vigilant."